This is my first post, thanks to finding the article about this website this morning on Huffington Post. (Congratulations, by the way for making the "big time".) I am a retired psychotherapist who used to write a column for the website Capitol Hill Blue, often addressing the psychological aspects of politics and politicians. I want to share a few thoughts that may or may not have been addressed in the forum before.

Motivation: The only sensible argument for the reason Barack Obama's mother went to incredible lengths to brilliantly falsify his birthplace is that, while she knew he would automatically be a citizen, his Kenyan birth would disallow him from becoming president. While it's all well and good to hope your baby would grow up to be president of the United States you have to ask that while she gave him the acceptably American first name of Barry, why would she give him the decidedly foreign middle name of Hussein?

Insane rationalizations for the ignorant not yet heard: "I know Obama was born in Kenya because he was born in the decidedly foreign sounding Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital and went to the none American sounding Punahou Academy." (Maybe they think Hawaii is really a territory of Kenya.) Let's face it, when one is looking for reasons to delegitimize President Obama rationality goes out the window. Besides, some of these birthers would probably favor a law not allowing all but the lily white born in multi-ethnic Hawaii from running for president.

As a possible start on the pathology and motivations......

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=7566&

Ther has also been some discussions both here and at Dr Conspiracy's site ( www.obamaconspiracy.org ) of how Birtherism may be a perfect exemplar of the characteristics of a "virtual" cult.

Welcome to TFB HalB. You may be on to something. There is anther thread here discussing one of the loonier Birthers, KenyabornObamacorn, who is trying to prove Hawaii is not a state.

Welcome and glad you found us!

Some of them have been blatantly racist and sexist, such as declaring that the Framers had no expectation that anyone other than a male WASP would ever be elected President. Somehow, the 14th Amendment did not make clear that this no longer held, if it ever did. There is a connection here to the Dominionists and Christian Reconstructionists as well as to White Supremacy and neo-Nazi ideologies.

I think that racism lies at the heart of most Birfers' motives. They keep moving the goalposts, evidence that no matter what the documentation of the President's birth is, it will never be acceptable. Another subset believes that only Republicans ought ever to be elected President. Orly Taitz keeps conjuring up crimes that would make the President a felon, just in case her argument about Natural Born Citizen fails.

The level of hatred of the President is astonishing and frightening. Some of them extend that to all liberals and Democrats.

There are many threads that speak to these matters, offering up this or that idiot's garbage in demonstration.

Objection! Assumes facts not admitted into evidence.

I was lucky enough to spend the entire summer of 1958 living with my aunt who had moved to Honolulu a few years before and still, at the age of 90, resides there. Hawaii was still a territory and there was great anticipation to it becoming a state. It became a state Aug. 21, 1959 to great celebration. My aunt send me a first day of issue statehood stamp with the Honolulu post mark with that date. (Unfortunately I lost it.)

Obama was born in 1961.

The Constitution states that "No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States." Of course lots of birthers would rather not admit that the president with the alien sounding name, the big ears and the dark complexion is really fully a "person".

How delusional am I to think that the Civil War and civil rights legislation finally settled that question.


Alaska was also a territory before it became a state. Eisenhower signed that bill into law on Jan. 3, 1959.

Whatever lunatic fringe argument there is for Hawaii not being a legitimate state and equally nonsensical case probably could be made for Alaska.

Than you for welcoming me to this website.

If this is a serious objection to my post I don't see anything that I wrote (except about who I am) that presumes to be a fact. It is meant as satirical speculation.

HalB - methinks it was a joke. Welcome to the Fogbow.

'twas a joke, HalB. We do that a lot here.

Welcome! I used to read CHB. I think you'll find some kindred spirits here.

I don't see any serious objections, and welcome.

It's a little overwhelming for us. I'm glad we got some ink around this great nation, and I'm thrilled that we've gotten some new members from it. But we've gotten a LOT of new members in just a couple days.

To the new folks: Go easy with us, please. To the boogle: Go easy with the newbies, please.

Sometimes we get people who pretend to be one of us, and then turn out to be birthers after a few posts. My personal favorite was a guy who variously pretended to be a) black b) a retired master sergeant from the U.S. Army, and c) completely new to the whole birther movement. This guy didn't even know if Orly Taitz was male or female.

Then it turned out he was none of those things, and we have a photo of him with his wife and Orly in a New Orleans courtroom.

So sometimes we're a little, umm ... hesitant to really embrace new members, 'cuz we been burned before. And I'll admit, there's a sort of orthodox set of Obot beliefs here that we all know, but not everybody does. I ask the boogle to be patient with new members and understand that they don't always show up on our doorstep with a full load of our received wisdom. Sometimes they're gonna ask questions that may seem dumb. We're friendly educators in that situation.

How do birthers think?

They don't.

I was going to get around to the psychological and socialogical implications but totally forgot to get back to it when I came back from vacation. I was flipping through one of my old books on cognition and randomly came across a chapter that pretty much covered the birther movement in a nutshell. It had to do with the creation of false memories.

This is a running lawyers' joke on TFB:

That is, is there any evidence that Birthers think, or do they just emote? I see that as the point of your initial post: none of this is about facts or logic; it is about fear and hatred. Part of that arises from the visibly changing demographics of the country, because the white power structure now depends upon a minority that is losing its grip every year. That is one of the reasons for the GOP attempt to disenfranchise people who are brown or black.

Welcome to The Fogbow, HalB.

Obviously I am not a birther troll, as glancing at the almost 200 columns I wrote for Capitol Hill Blue will attest. Hal's CHB columns.

I live in Middleboro, Massachustetts, a town with more than it's share of right wing haters. We have been in the national news (Associated Press, ABC, CBS, HuffPo) lately for a town ordinance against using profanity in public.

In my effort to understand why people hate Obama so much I interviewed the man who posted this sign in his yard on a well traveled street.



Here's the column I wrote about him: http://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/18174

My belief is that the better we understand who we are up against, the better equipped we are to defeat them.

I share this belief.

And welcome!

@Halb

Welcome and pull up a chair....

As a new boy/girl/whatever on the block, there may be the occassional small piece of piesnark that comes your way during the initial couple of posts. As Foggy stated there have been a few, shall we say, "disingenuous" folks, who have flown by, dropped of a box of stinky old cat litter and run off to the safe little censored havens of Birferstan crowing about "Gettin the obots".

There can be a bit of a "Weeeeeeelllllllll lets just see shall we", nothing personal, its just that the 101st Keyboard Kommando Klatch of the Birthers have tended to piddle in the pool a bit alas.....

On the other hand we have some seriously sharp people here who have been slapping around Birthers since 2008. They vary from lawyers, mathematicians, IT and Information Security geeks and just plain folks. (I like to think of myself as falling into the category of Obot Thug.... ).

If you want to get a good handle of what is happening in Birtherstan, particularly the paper terrorism of the law suits, I don't think you will find a better resource on the web.

Having said that as you can see from the forum we're also pretty agnostic about pretty much any subject under the sun.....

So welcome, have fun and join the party.....

Yes, but have you been so christened by Queen Orly?

Funny you would mention that. Could we ask our Maproom Manager to post that map for Hal?

And welcome kind sir.

I read the column and the comments. Welcome to Fogbow. I very much appreciate your calm, clear-eyed way.

Very interesting column. Mr. Signmaker escalates the name-calling because milder words no longer get attention, but his target audience dismisses him because he clearly doesn't apply the words correctly. Like Birthers. They perceive Obama as "Other", which won't attract any empathy, so they escalate to "alien" then "Illegal alien". They are all railing at a new world they can't understand, in terms that don't mean what they really want to say.

Welcome!

Welcome to The Fogbow, Hal.

For an overview of "the birther mind", you should visit my blog. It aggregates all the currently updated birther blogs.

Even better, the imaginary "John Charlton" of the Pest and Fail named me as a Brownshirt Obot Hitlerian thug ....so there......

Fully delusional. The issue of the big ears was never resolved.